Chris may have made it easy for a lot of folks to make great sounding mp3's, but there are some issues with his guides. I'd suggest reading the EAC forums and the FAQ over at HydrogenAudio. The best way is not to use a ready made profile, but rather to know why you are using whatever settings and/or switches you are using.

OSNN Senior Addict

What do you mean? The purpose of EAC is to get a perfect rip of a track from the CD to your hard disk. The compression is up to the whatever codec you choose and not EAC itself. Most CD ripping software will pride itself on speed, and not accuracy, and you will get small read errors in your rips.

I feel good knowing that my CD collection can be ripped without any data loss or read errors onto my hard disk, and if there are any EAC will let me know. The fact that it can be ripped to a lossy format does not really have anything to do it.

OSNN Senior Addict

when i bought radioheads last disc and it failed to play in half of my cd players (i.e my sony mp3cd player, bought it in 2001).... i had to resort to EAC to create a copy of the cd to bypass the BS copyright scheme.

I had to rip at like 1x mind you.

EAC all the way because most new cds are copy controlled.
I cant say enough about the program...

What made the radiohead story sweet tho.... was writing to EMI Canada (Capitol records Canada)... and getting a free non-copy controlled version of the album.

- geek -

Most any good cd ripping program can rip w/out the hearable pops, ect. It seems like a waste of time to make a perfect rip of a cd (basically a clone) to only go and convert that to a lossy format like mp3. If your going to make a perfect rip (via EAC) go lossless is all I'm saying. EAC rip -> mp3 is similiar to putting a purfect paintjob on your car to take it driving thru the mud.

OSNN Senior Addict

Most any good cd ripping program can rip w/out the hearable pops, ect. It seems like a waste of time to make a perfect rip of a cd (basically a clone) to only go and convert that to a lossy format like mp3. If your going to make a perfect rip (via EAC) go lossless is all I'm saying. EAC rip -> mp3 is similiar to putting a purfect paintjob on your car to take it driving thru the mud.

.. Commodore ..

About the only thing I don't like about mp3's is that when you have a cd that is continues, no gaps - Like a live concert cd for example, and ripp it you will always get gaps between the tracks. About the only way to avoid this is to use ogg vorbis or keep it as a wav file. Other than that mp3 works fine.

What ever bit rat you are ripping it at will make more of an affect on the quality than anything. Which is why I suugest using --alt-preset extreme when you ripp .. Also the type of program you use to ripp will have an affect on the sound quality. If you use garbage like Cddextracter, Audiograbber, slurp, and the others that copy them. As well as use xing technology to ripp the cd, then you will have a crappy sounding cd. This is why I use nothing but EAC with Lame and Ogg Vorbis. The only thing with ogg is that portable mp3 players don't recognize it, in which case you can just ripp it to a wav file and play on it ..

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The Analog Kid

1) mp3 can be indistinguishable from cd (see LAME)
2) If you use LAME and a lame tag aware program (foobar2000) to play the files back, they are gapless
3) I don't care what format I use, I don't want to hear errors.
4) most ripping programs rip in a burst mode, 1 read and if there's an error, you're stuck with it.

.. Commodore ..

1) mp3 can be indistinguishable from cd (see LAME)
2) If you use LAME and a lame tag aware program (foobar2000) to play the files back, they are gapless
3) I don't care what format I use, I don't want to hear errors.
4) most ripping programs rip in a burst mode, 1 read and if there's an error, you're stuck with it.

1) You will notice a quality diff in mp3 as apposed to cd. It is because of the way an mp3 is made. This is why it is best to use high bitrates, anything above 160 is cd quality. I prefer --alt-preset extreme .. If you don't like the diff you could always keep it as a wav file, or use something like Ogg vorbis or monkey audio.

2) It does not matter if the program is lame tag aware or not (winamp is). There will always be gaps in the song between tracks. There is no way around this.

Ep, glad to see you come back and tidy up...did want to ask a one day favor, I want to enhance my resume , was hoping you could make me administrator for a day, if so, take me right off since I won't be here to do anything, and don't know the slightest about the board, but it would be nice putting "served administrator osnn", if can do, THANKS